On The Trail Of Queen Victoria In The Highlands

• How many Munros did Queen Victoria bag?
• What 'essential services' did John Brown perform for Victoria? (and why was Albert always tired?)
• How many horses (to the nearest hundred) were needed to undertake a Royal Tour?

What happens when you send a Marxist on the tracks of Queen Victoria in the Highlands? - you get a book somewhat more interesting than the usual run of the mill royalist biographies!

Ian R Mitchell took up the challenge of attempting to write with critical empathy on the peregrinations of Vikki Regina in the Highlands, and about her residence at Balmoral, through which a neo-feudal fairyland was created on Upper Deeside. The expeditions, social rituals and iconography of that world are explored and exploded from within, in what Mitchell terms a Bolshevisation of Balmorality. He follows in Victoria's footsteps throughout the Cairngorms and beyond, to the further reaches of the Highlands. On this journey, a grudging respect and even affection for Vikki ('the best of the bunch') emerges.

The book is designed to enable the armchair/motorised reader, or walker, to follow in the steps of the most widely-travelled royal personage in the Highlands since Bonnie Prince Charlie had wandered there a century earlier.

• Index map and 12 detailed maps
• 21 walks in Victoria's footsteps
• Rarely seen Washington Wilson photographs
• Colour and black and white reproductions of contemporary paintings

On the Trail of Queen Victoria in the Highlands will also appeal to those with an interest in the social and cultural history of Scotland and the Highlands - and the author, ever-mindful of his own 'royalties', hopes the declining band of monarchists might also be persuaded to give the book a try. There has never been a book on Victoria like this.